Tuesday, March 13, 2018

Putin Wanted Talks with Trump But Kim Got Them and Kremlin May Now Take More Risks, Preobrazhensky Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, March 13 – Vladimir Putin
made it crystal clear in his speech to the Federal Assembly that he wants talks
with Donald Trump as an equal, but Washington’s response was to ignore or at
least dismiss the Kremlin leader’s message and choose instead to have a summit meeting
with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, Ivan Preobrazhensky says.

This represents almost an American “spitting
in the face of Russian politicians” who expected an entirely different
response, the Moscow analyst says. But “it turns out that the US doesn’t fear
Russia with its enormous nuclear arsenal but has agreed to risk its president
by sending him to Pyongyang for talks”(rosbalt.ru/world/2018/03/12/1687989.html).

One can understand Washington’s
calculation, he suggests.“If North
Korea is a country with obviously unpredictable behavior that might do anything
including launching a nuclear attack on the US, then no one seriously expects anything
of the kind from Russia.”The Trump
Administration simply doesn’t believe Moscow poses that kind of unpredictable
threat.

Obviously, one very much wants to
hope that the American leadership has “assessed correctly the Kremlin’s level
of responsibility for its actions,” Preobrazhensky concludes, thus implicitly
suggesting that Putin may decide to adopt even more risky maneuvers to achieve
his goals given that in the last two weeks Kim Jong-Un has “eclipsed” him.

If that should prove to be the case,
of course, the risks of a graver crisis will increase exponentially, especially
if the Kremlin leader is convinced not only that the West will not respond in a
tough manner to almost anything he does but also that it may give him what he
wants if he behaves even worse than he has.